Advancements in automotive digital technology leverage the immense computing power available in present day vehicles for optimizing not only a vehicle's internal functions, but for developing connectivity with the outside world. These connected vehicle applications are typically referred to as Cooperative Intelligent Transport Systems (C-ITS), Car-2-Car (C2C), Vehicle-to-Vehicle (V2V), Car-2-Infrastructure (C2I), Vehicle-to-Infrastructure (V2I), Car-to-Everything (C2X), or collectively as Vehicle-to-Everything (V2X) applications.
Typically, V2X applications may entail use of radio communication links to form adhoc communications networks with other similarly equipped vehicles, pedestrians, and/or infrastructure units such as roadside units, traffic lights and connected devices, for automatically communicating position and other information. The communicated information, in turn, may be used along with existing technology such as autonomous in-vehicle sensors to provide additional capabilities. These additional capabilities, for example, may include sensing the surrounding environment for enabling automated driver assistance, traffic management, road maintenance, and predicting or detecting hazards and potentially life-critical situations. Thus, even the slightest delay or error in communicating the information may result in loss of life and property. Therefore, V2X applications may be thoroughly tested and validated before deployment in real world systems.
Efficient design and implementation of test frameworks used for testing V2X applications, however, may entail significant technical and/or logistical challenges. For example, ensuring robustness of safety applications and algorithms in presence of obstructions, varying weather conditions, different terrains, presence or absence of unconnected and connected vehicles, and/or other connected systems, may be difficult unless optimized before manufacture.
Accordingly, certain conventional test systems may employ computer simulations followed by on-road testing. For example, certain conventional simulators may provide simplified simulations corresponding to mobility of vehicles and/or traffic conditions. Such simulation testing may be followed by extensive experiments and trials at test tracks and/or on actual roads. Test tracks and actual road testing, however, may allow for only limited coverage of the considerable number of potential scenarios and participating vehicles that may be encountered in real life. Further, it may be difficult to replicate detected issues exactly in subsequent road tests. Additionally, road testing can be expensive in terms of provision of physical assets and/or human resources, and may often place a driver and the vehicle under grave safety risks.
Certain alternative approaches may employ emulators that use actual on-board units (OBUs) and/or roadside units (RSUs) to emulate various testing scenarios for desired V2X applications in a laboratory environment. However, the number of emulated OBUs or RSUs in a testing scenario may be restricted to a small number of devices that can be synchronously managed by such conventional V2X emulators. Thus, conventional V2X emulators often provide inadequate scalability of the testing scenarios to include a few tens to a few hundreds of stations, which requires considerable expense, complexity, and time. Moreover, conventional emulators typically include no provision for testing the OBUs and RSUs for unauthorized access, and testing for interoperability of devices from different manufacturers. Conventional V2X emulators, thus, may fail to provide holistic and/or exhaustive testing of V2X applications to ensure safety of passengers, vehicles, and surrounding infrastructure. Particularly, conventional emulators may not have any provision to allow testing of a variety of aspects of V2X applications running on a vehicle's actual on board unit (OBU) hardware by simulating vehicle mobility and their associated effects in real world conditions.